Posts Tagged ‘inventors’
“Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should”*…
“What do we do to things we don’t need/want/like?” Amy Erickson asks on her blog, Oh, Bite It!. “We fry it … that’s what!” In this case, the creator of deep-fried Pumpkin Spice Lattes and, for rougher days, deep-fried tequila shots has put Brach’s famous candy corn inside Pillsbury dough rounds and subjected the whole package to a bath of hot oil. The finished product is dusted with powered sugar, zeppole-style, and allegedly yields “doughy pillows” that are “just a shadow of that seasonal, sad, tooth-buster of a treat.”
In a world in which somebody has already fried every bagged item that comes in a snack size — M&Ms, Tootsie Rolls, Twizzlers — no one can really blame Erickson for daring to dream, but the ultimate end-of-October Frankenfood made Rusty Foster’s Today in Tabs (“Two words: DEEP FRIED CORN CANDY”), and now that’s basically what the internet is doing, pretty unanimously and in repulsion:
May vomit at desk http://t.co/tOiTPj50CL via @rustyk5pic.twitter.com/kPTQ0rDjf
— Kyla Gardner (@gardnerkyla) October 20, 2014
Not everything needs to be fried RT @DarthVenn: Fried candy corn balls.pic.twitter.com/AvNzRUd20Y
— F. Thot Fitzgerald (@DaniFantastic) October 21, 2014
Fried. candy corn. LISTEN, MAYNE. pic.twitter.com/djDdrdQW7B
— Laraine Lujack (@therainebeaux) October 21, 2014
Why did the phrase “deep fried candy corn” just crawl across my timeline? Why is that a thing? What is the matter with people?
— H. G. WellActually (@andthenlynsaid) October 20, 2014
Deep fried? Fine. Candy? Okay. Corn? We’ll allow it. But those four words in THAT order? NAW.
— H. G. WellActually (@andthenlynsaid) October 20, 2014
Well, almost. Some blame is getting spread onto others known to fry a thing or two
:I believe Paula Deen did this. RT @__Huss: RT @Nerdonic: Satan. “@DarthVenn: Fried candy corn balls. pic.twitter.com/VZJSytXs6u“
— Styx (@RenRennyy) October 20, 2014
via Grub Street
* proverbial saying of unknown origin
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As we heat up the oil, we might send fertile birthday greetings to Luther George Simjian; he was born on this date in 1905. The son of Armenian parents in Turkey, Simjian escaped the genocide and made his way to the U.S., where he worked initially as a lab photographer at Yale Medical School– and began his career as a inventor, creating a projector for microscope images among many other devices.
In 1934 Simjian moved to New York City, where he invented a self-posing portrait camera, with which the photographed person could see and optimize their own image in a mirror before the photo was actually taken. In order to manufacture and distribute the camera, which became a success for use in department stores, he founded the company Photoreflex. Years later, after selling the invention and the trade name, the company was renamed Reflectone, after another of Simjian’s inventions, a kind of cosmetic chair with movable mirrors, via which one could see one’s own body from all perspectives.
In 1939 Simjian had the idea to build the Bankmatic Automated Teller Machine, probably his most famous invention. Despite skepticism from banks, he registered 20 patents for it and developed a number of features and principles that can still be found in today’s ATMs– including their name. He finally persuaded the City Bank of New York (today Citibank) to run a 6-month trial. The trial was discontinued — surprisingly not due to technical inefficiencies, but to lack of demand. “It seems the only people using the machines were a small number of prostitutes and gamblers who didn’t want to deal with tellers face to face,” Simjian wrote. Hence Simjian missed out on not only the commercial success, but also the fame associated with inventing the ATM. (This credit is often attributed to John Shepherd-Barron, who invented the first true electronic ATM, and Donald Wetzel, who directed a 5 million US-$ project to build upon Shepherd-Barron’s invention in the late 1960s.)
Simjian achieved real commercial success during World War II with another invention, his Optical Range Estimation Trainer, a kind of simple flight simulator, made from mirrors, light sources and miniature airplanes, used to train US military pilots in estimating the speed and distance of airplanes; Simjian sold over 2000 of these devices. Today’s successor of Reflectone (after a number of mergers and acquisitions), CAE, is still selling flight simulation and control technology.
Simjian founded several other companies in the following years and invented a number of very different devices and technologies,including a teleprompter, medical ultrasound devices, a remote-controlled postage meter, a golf simulator, and a meat tenderizer. He never stopped inventing in his laboratories in Fort Lauderdale. At the age of 92, he got his last patent on a process for improving the sound of wood for musical instruments– seven months before his death in 1997.
“Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?”*…
Sitting in a Starbucks in Plano, Texas in 1997, “Winter” (who has legally changed his name from Rafael Lozano) decided to visit every one of the coffee chain’s outlets, everywhere they’d popped up around the world. In 1997, that meant 1,400 stores. Seventeen years and more than $100,000 later, he’s patronized 11,733 Starbucks across six continents– a majority , but by no means all of the 17,000 in operation today. He documents his visits and charts the ones he’s still missing on his web site.
A freelance programmer, Winter spends his off-time in independent coffee houses:
I respect Starbucks for its business sense, customer service and amenities including clean bathrooms and WiFi. But unless I am checking a new store off my list, I would not go there for the coffee.
More on this hopped-up hobbyist at “Ultimate coffee fan spends 17 years visiting every Starbucks in the world.”
* Albert Camus (or not: while the phrase is attributed to Camus, uncited, in Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice, there’s no documentary evidence… still, it seems an apposite title for this post)
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As we try to remember which size “Venti” is, we might recall that it was on this date in 1865 that John Wesley Hyatt was awarded a patent on the first celluloid billiard ball. hyatt had developed the ball in response to a competition sponsored by billiard ball maker Phelan & Collander, who were offering a $10,000 reward for a suitable substitute for ivory, the growing shortage of which was threatening their business. Hyatt took the prize– and in the process, created and introduced to the world the first industrial plastic.
“There are no facts, only interpretations”*…
Danish duo Mikael Wulff and Anders Morgenthaler create visuals depicting the everyday struggles, irritations, and insights of their fellow Westerners. Their official-looking graphs illuminate the unofficial statistics of our daily lives, offering insights that are at once unexpected and glaringly obvious.
They publish their work every day on Wumo, their webcomic and newspaper cartoon strip (formerly known as Wulffmorgenthaler); they’re archived at Kind of Normal.
See a selection at demilked; see even more at Kind of Normal.
* Friedrich Nietzsche
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As we exult in explication, we might send consoling birthday greetings to Rufus Porter; he was born on this date in 1792. A visionary and prolific inventor, Porter had painfully little business sense. He held over 100 patents, including a fire alarm, a signal telegraph, a fog whistle, a washing machine, and a revolving firearm… He sold his patent for the lattermost to Samuel Colt for $100 in 1844. With those proceeds, Porter published the first issue of Scientific American (on August 28, 1845)– but sold that business 10 months later.
Not quite ready for prime time?…
3D printing is an emerging technology of extraordinary promise. But like any new tool, it’s early use is largely about understanding how it works… which makes for piles of unsuccessfully-attempted constructs– as amusingly illustrated in the Flickr stream “The Art of 3D Print Failure.”
{Example above, via Flickr/MaX Fredroom]
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As we recheck our settings, we might send precisely-threaded birthday greetings to Cullen Whipple; he was born on this date in 1801. A machinist, Whipple invented and patented the first practical device for making pointed screws (a marked improvement on earlier screws, which were blunt-ended and required the drilling of “starter holes”). Cullen joined with partners to incorporate The New England Screw Co., then went on to invent and patent seven other machines that improved the manufacture of screws.
Hey Joe…
The milligrams of caffeine per ounce vary from chain to chain as wildly as the mood of someone hopped up on six cups from McDonalds… or one cup from the Death Wish Coffee Company.
[Data from the Center for Science in the Public Interest and EnergyFiend.com, via Thrillist]
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As we add a shot of espresso to that, we might recall that it was on this date in 1953, after a year of experimentation, that marine engineer and retired semi-pro baseball player David Mullany, Sr. invented the Wiffleball. (He patented it early the following year.) Watching his 13-year-old son play with a broomstick and a plastic golf ball ball in the confines of their backyard, Mullany worried that the effort to throw a curve would damage his young arm. So he fabricated a full- (baseball-)sized ball from the plastic used in perfume packaging, with oblong holes on one side… a ball that would naturally curve. The balls had the added advantage, given their light weight, that they’d not break windows.
David Jr. came up with the name: he was fond of saying that he had “whiffed” the batters that he struck out with his curves. The “h” was dropped, the name trademarked, and (after Woolworth’s adopted the item) a generation of young ballplayers– and their parents– converted.
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